Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

liberation

Reflection on the Day of Pentecost, Year A

Happy birthday, Church, we say on Pentecost— meaning not our local community but whole Big C, the Church universal— but what if Luke in Acts 2, citing ancestor Joel, saw a bigger vision in the tongues, the fire, Holy Spirit moving, touching everyone, surging wind filling the whole space and beyond as crowds gathered amazed, these devout Jews— were there only Jews— from every nation gathered in Jerusalem for Shavuot, the feast of weeks fifty days after Passover and the Resurrection, how could they all fit in one room that was intended for disciples including women of course; how is violent wind of many fiery tongues contained in one room?

Did the walls disappear, not crashing down not scaring or hurting people nor in battle as at Jericho but vanishing so that in a twinkling the room is the world the street is the room all open to the divine swirling in and around them— all things are possible with God— so on that day as on all days there were no limits on the Spirit of God that brooded long ago on the face of the deep in the first days.

In the last days God says I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh young and old all genders humans of all stations including those not allowed their God-given freedom, all flesh, God says— when does all not mean all, and if we claim the right to change the word, to say it is only people who believe a certain way, what or who is our authority?

Are we still waiting or did the last days already come— has not God poured already does not God pour every day, are not all blessed, and how do we, will we, you and I, respond?

About this poem . . . Walls are often necessary, but we also can get stuck behind them. I don’t think God likes many of our walls, so often slipping through them and hoping we do, too. The biggest, hardest walls are, of course, the ones in our heads.

Written for and Delivered at the
Interfaith Passover Seder
sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace – Metro DC Chapter
at Calvary Baptist Church, Washington, D.C.
March 19, 2017/5777

I join you tonight as I did last year in prayer and hope, as a queer Christian minister and theologian/poet, married to a beautiful Jewish man, member of Jewish Voice for Peace, Reform Temple, and an LGBTQI affirming, multi-racial Protestant church, citizen of this nation that still imprisons Native peoples on reservations and kills descendants of slaves on the streets for crimes of living while Red and/or Black, where plagues of ethnic, gender, religious, bodily, and sexual hates are often the center of public life, as they live and grow among some at or near the pinnacle of national leadership.

We are not alone in taking land, we know its ancient roots in Torah, and we know countless ones today who are displaced, unplaced, misplaced, replaced as were hundreds of thousands in the Nakba, just as we know that second class citizens live not only in prisons, ghettos, and reservations here but also on streets and in neighborhoods of Jerusalem, along with others who are citizens of no country confined to refugee camps, water-less deserts, and outposts under constant threat of dislocation, trying to live and breathe where once they were born and played as children, and grew to tend their flocks and orchards.

So as we gather in the midst of ugliness, fear, and othering, we claim our inheritance as people who cherish liberation, our own and that of others, knowing this day
like all others is made for us to wake up, grow up,
look up, act up, stand up, live up, speak up
so captives go free.

We gather in an ancient and honorable ritual
celebrating another time when people rose to be free,
and like them our words, songs, prayers, and food
prepare us and recommit us to march, to resist,
to claim the mantle bequeathed by Moses,
and Esther and Jeremiah, to speak truth to powers,
to say to modern princes: Let the people of Palestine breathe,
end the Occupation of their land, their homes, their minds—
and yes, well-funded overlords, free yourselves from the tangled webs
you create with ancient enmities and entitlements
creating more war, more chaos, more ugliness, more death.

We seek a new way, a time of milk and honey for all, when peace and justice glow in and through the golden dome of God for all the world. We shall do our part to make it so, knowing, believing, it is our divinely inspired mission, to join with many others here and there, to create the new Jerusalem, the new Israel, the new Palestine, the new USA, the new people there and here, everywhere, no longer living and walking in fear, no longer dispossessed, no longer forgotten, no longer denied entry, exit, jobs, housing, life, or dignity for being on the wrong side of one line, one wall, one gate, one identity, or another.

Reflection on Palm Sunday, Year A

We say each week in church “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God.” Who do we mean? Are we thinking of Jesus riding on the donkey in Jerusalem or our pastor, preacher, other spiritual leader? Or ourselves? Could we be the ones who are blessed to come in the name of God?

When the alarm goes off in the morning, do we come to in the name of God? Pee and shower in the name of God, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, lunch, the store, return home, eat dinner, bathe the children, tuck them in, watch television, read the paper or our book, have sex, go to sleep, in the name of God?

The crowds acclaimed the Son of Daivd as he rode the donkey walking on their cloaks and branches, a peoples’ carpet— believing he was their champion in the face of domination by Rome and distance from religious authorities. Today, without fanfare, in terror of what lies behind and perhaps ahead, refugees flee the devastation of war, extremism, chemicals, poverty, maybe all of the above, Blessed are the ones who come, claiming in Jerusalem and elsewhere power that resists fear, breaks institutional barriers, defies narrowness, all in the name of the God of of holiness everywhere, in everyone.

Who knows what will happen—a dead body hanging from a tree or lying on a street or the desert with a chest full of bullet holes, or sex work or drug-running for a pimp, or maybe, just maybe, a new life, dignity, deepening of soul connection, new love or better job, appreciation by others for gifts freely shared in sacred communion.

Whatever. Blessed are the ones who come, and go, in the name of God.

About this poem . . .It is easy to read or listen to this familiar story and see Jesus, the donkey, the disciples, the crowds, and to wave our own branches (although I have not seen coats laid on the ground), and feel good. But what about today? What are we doing that might cause others to see God riding or walking or loving or speaking in and/or through us? And do we allow ourselves to see, to experience, the blessing of ordinary, as well as extraordinary, others who come in the name of God?

Reflection for the 5th Sunday in Lent, Year A

His bones were not yet dry but after four days his soul-less body needed Jesus to breathe him back to life just as Ezekiel records God did for the Israelites. How many times have you been resurrected? Even in a good life there can be dead ends for which holy help is the only way out.

Fleeing war zones, finding refuge in camps, waiting for clearance to emigrate, arriving in a strange land— this is resurrection, a time to hear “Unbind them, and let them go, ” just as gay men, lesbian women, transgender siblings, rescuing themselves from closets, breathe freer where spirits and bodies live in wholesome union, no longer victims of anti-sex and gender wars .

Tombs are everywhere, rulers building more private prisons, hells hundreds of miles from somewhere, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) freezing folks out, police continuing urban carnage within walls of despair and fear. Lazarus was lucky, love that freed his entombed body seems in short supply today.

The Mary-Martha-Lazarus-Jesus Family home a center where ties that bind are love, where even when he is late, Jesus is welcomed, freed to be himself, to do impossible things that look easy because he wastes no words in argument, going right to freeing the captive, not seeking applause or waiting for authorization from any ruler except the One whose decrees are freedom, life, love, hope.

Reflection in response to Proper 16, 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (focus on Luke: 13:10-17)

The bent over woman stood up straight, praising God, when Jesus touched her, erasing her long disfigurement, and people in the synagogue rejoiced. Scholars agree Jesus did not violate halakhah, the compilation of Jewish law governing worship, even as Luke records objection by the synagogue leader. Rules often help communities to be strong, orderly, but leaders, not just in synagogues to be sure, can confuse order they want with order God wants— not always the same. When health, liberation, mercy, are at stake, as then, like now, the rules enabling those outcomes control. But do really follow those rules all the time? If we did, would health care and prisons be run for profit, would anyone be allowed to carry firearms in school, would we then allow God’s creation to be spoiled by greed, dictators to fire poison at their people, officers to shoot Black men just because they can, Palestinians to be denied their own true homeland?

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It is tempting to leave Jesus back there in synagogue, upending the claim of power by the leader, feeling all righteous, critical, about the leader then, instead of hearing our Lord here and now, saying about rules of today, Stop! Indeed laying holy hands on victims of health care and prison profit rules so they, and more importantly we, can stand straight and throw off the tyranny keeping them bent down. And he, then as now, weeping not only over Jerusalem— but also the earth despoiled by our careless selfishness, children at risk in school, brave citizens gassed by their own leaders, our streets war zones where peace officers shoot first, ask later— he touches us as he touched the crippled woman so that finally we can take his power, his love, his peace from the sanctuary where we too often embalm it into the world that too is bent over, crippled, crying out in pain, and need.

There is hope, yes, always hope, but its wealth cannot be shared if we do not follow him in breaking the rules of oppression and keeping rules that liberate. Jesus asks us to go to the hard places, and stand up.

About this poem…..The text does not say it, but the synagogue ruler was probably a Pharisee, and it is so easy to poke not only fun but also righteous judgment at them—forgetting our own Pharisaic ways, and our own resort to rules to keep order rather than freedom and liberation. This incident is not intended to be about people long ago so much as it is a caution to us. Can we overcome rules of today—stuff we breathe so much we cannot see its effect, like thinking “for profit” means better care, that authorities must know what they are doing, that guns save lives, that the survival of one people is more important than the survival of another?

A Meditation for the 7th Sunday of Easter (click here for biblical texts)

The cynic’s saying No good deed goes unpunished may have occurred to Paul in Philippi when— after making common cause with Lydia and friends—he ordered ugly spirits to leave a servant girl who irritated him with public pronouncements . We don’t know her feelings about being released from demon’s power but Paul and Silas find themselves on the wrong end of the law because her owners are enriched from her fortune-telling. Not for the first time or the last, emissaries of The Way find themselves stripped, beaten, and locked up.

bloorlansdownechristianfellowship.wordpress.com

But the story takes an unexpected turn to become one of the greatest liberation moments of all time, perhaps ultimate in nonviolent revolution, a model for how God works when we pray and get out of the way. Singing and praying in the night, as their fellow prisoners listen, some force—is it an act of nature or of God or simply the earnest, faithful power of their prayers and voices— creates a midnight disturbance, an earthquake we are told, that flings open every cell door without so much as leaving a trace of damage to the walls and foundation. Even more, no one injured, not even the jailer who had confined Paul and Silas to the worst of the puny accommodations. In gratitude he takes his new friends home for blessing and supper.

This is the way we want our world to work! Hebrews escape between the walls of the Red Sea but Egyptians are so overcome by the sight they do not pursue and thus do not die. Israelites advance into Canaan and locals are so glad to see them they throw a neighborhood party. In his determination to find the child born in Bethlehem Herod throws a giant party, treating all the children and their parents to dinner, games and magic show before sending them home. In our own version of Canaan (recreated in Palestine in 1948?), European settlers bring much wealth to share with natives, no attacks are made by either side, no reservations for native peoples are created and none die from diseases imported from Europe. And here’s one more: needing to import labor, recruiters go to Africa with brochures and bonuses for early signing, inviting locals onto cruise ships for the voyage across the Atlantic with secure, paying jobs and health care waiting here for those who choose the journey to try a New World.

And how about this? Police, leaders, citizens learn to sit down with young Black men, listen to what they need to gain self-respect, and then work to meet the need.

A utopia, you say?

But why not? Paul and Silas were two men, people like us. God is still God. Let’s start praying and singing (don’t worry about your voice, it is the intention that matters), and expecting the disturbance. The world is ready for change. It begins when we unlock whatever cell of despair, discouragement, and doubt where we have put ourselves or have allowed others with a different agenda to confine us.

About this poem . . .Acts of the Apostles continues to share stories of divine intervention (at least that is how I see an earthquake that does no damage) that challenge our rational minds. But is that not the job of faith, to move us beyond our ordinary selves into the realm of Spirit where anything may happen, especially if it intends or results in liberation for the oppressed?

Written for and Delivered at the Interfaith Passover Seder sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace – Metro DC Chapter at Calvary Baptist Church, Washington, D.C. April 3, 2016/5776

Praying to Change the World

I join you tonight in prayer and hope and peace and love, even joy, as a queer Christian minister and theologian, married to a beautiful Jewish man, a father, grandfather, brother, uncle, member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Conservative/Reconstructionist synagogue and an LGBTQI affirming, multi-racial Protestant church, citizen of this land that is still far from free, that still imprisons Native peoples on reservations and kills descendants of slaves on the streets for crimes of living while Red and/or Black where ethnic, gender, religious, bodily, and sexual hates are often the center of our national dialogue, and embraced by some who want to be our leaders. That is my personal context; it probably bears at least some relation to yours. We are in this together, one way or another.

We gather with our own histories and our shared history. We know that we are not alone in taking land from those who lived on the land before us, we know its ancient roots as recorded in Torah and we know countless ones today who are displaced, unplaced, misplaced, replaced as were hundreds of thousands in the Nakba, just as we know that second class citizens live not only in prisons and jails here but also on streets and in neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

So we gather in the truth of this time with all its ugliness and fear and othering, but we are here also because we claim our inheritance as people who know something about liberation, our own and that of others, and because we know this day like all other days is made for us to wake up,
grow up, look up, act up, stand up, live up, speak up
from our heritage as people whose Creator breathes life
into all beings, pouring sacred water down
for all beings without exception, not based on any
puny criteria of mortals who walk among us.

What makes this night different from all other nights?
Only this: we are gathered here today in an ancient
and honorable ritual, but if all we do is recite the words,
sing the songs, eat the food, say the prayers it will
fade like so many other days into the cavernous
space of forgotten promises, avoided truths, fearful
inaction, well-meaning but empty expressions of care.

So as we proclaim again, Next Year In Jerusalem, we don’t want it to be the same one it is now, we want it to be a truly golden city, of real peace. We intend to do our part to make it so, because we are drawing this day on the power of each other and all sacred beings who roam among us, and we know, we believe, that it is our mission, our divinely inspired mission, to join with others, many others here and there, to create the new Jerusalem, the new Israel, the new Palestine, the new USA, the new people there and here, everywhere, no longer living and walking in fear, no longer dispossessed, no longer forgotten, no longer denied entry, exit, jobs, housing, life, or dignity for being on the wrong side of one line, one wall, one gate, one identity, or another.

We pray tonight, whether prayers be traditional or postmodern, whether they be to a power greater than ourselves or desire spoken in unbelief only to ourselves, or perhaps not spoken with lips at all but on our posters and in letters to editors— because we are all in this together, one way or another, and because I know, and I believe you know, we can change the world. Amen.